User's Guide

The User's guide is targeted towards the end-user of a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) setup using gCube tools. It focuses on the community portals that provide access to the VRE capabilities for content management and collection search/browsing. The guide conceptually comprises of two parts: a common part that describes common functionality offered by any portal, and an application specific part describing the two portals implemented in the context of D4Science for the FARM and ImpECt communities respectively. The guide also includes a chapter on User security describing the basic security concepts and establishes procedures that a user should know and follow in order to access a gCube community portal.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Basic Concepts
   1. Virtual Research Environments and Community Portals
   2. Content and Collections
   3. Content Annotation
   4. Metadata
3. Common Functionality
   1. Login to a VO/VRE
   2. Search
      1. Select Collections
      2. Search
      3. Quick & Google Search
      4. Geospatial Search
   3. Result Browsing
      1. The Basket
   4. Annotations
   5. Content Viewer
   6. User Profile Management
      1. User Profile Editing
   7. Report Management
      1. Template Creation
      2. Report Generation
   8. Course Management
   9. Time Series
   10. AquaMaps : Species Distribution and Biodiversity Maps
4. Usage Scenarios
   1. Login to a portal instance and select a VRE
   2. Perform a search and view the metadata of a record
   3. Change the XSLT at your profile and view the results using the new XSLT
   4. Annotating Information Objects
   5. Send a workspace area item to another user

1. References
2. Bibliography
3. Glossary